15 Years Later

Alright, so Larsen has repeatedly insisted that I tell this story.  It’s one of his favorites from that first meeting at Buffalo Wild Wings.  Fine then, here we go.

One of the nicknames I gained from my coworkers at a hospital that I worked at was Crash Tyson.  The “Crash” part of this comes from when I totaled my car later that year.  Miraculously nobody hit me or got hit.  It was a one-man job.  So my coworkers called me Crash for a bit.  But that’s not the story here. 

One morning while working at the same hospital, a patient punched me in the face.  I don’t mean he started swinging and caught me with the corner of his knuckle, or that he just hit me in the side of the head.  No, straight in the face.

For healthcare legal reasons I can’t say much about him, but this person was very confused and had a chaperone.

About three quarters of the way through his echo, I asked him to turn onto his back.  He pushed himself up and leaned on his elbow, about to get up. 

I simply said, “Oh, no, on your back please.”  His chaperone said the same thing.

The guy looked at me, looked down at his elbow, looked at me again for a couple of seconds, and then- 

POP!  Right in the eye.  The punch knocked me off of my chair, and suddenly I was on the ground (still holding the echo probe because I’m a goddamn professional).

I wasn’t knocked out, but I was a bit stunned for a second.  The guy looked down at me and said, “Fucker.”  His chaperone began verbally scolding him.

Within about ten seconds, our unit nurse came flying around the corner.  I must have screamed, “Ow!” or something along those lines when I, you know, got punched in the face.  The nurse looked down at me and said, “What are you doing?  Why are you on the ground?”

I said, very matter-of-factly, “I got hit in the face.”

“Alright, we’re done here,” she said, then came in and helped me to my feet while the patient continued swearing.  As soon as she got me to my feet, she started badgering me, “Sit down!  Sit down!  Have a seat somewhere!”

So, I found myself sitting in the opposite corner of the room from the guy.  This tiny sweetheart of a nurse bravely went right up to the patient to detach the electrodes that we use for our exams, while softly asking, “Hey there, what happened? Why did you do that?”

I heard him say something about an asshole.

“No, he was just doing his job,” the chaperone scolded him again. 

The guy looked at the two of them, and then between them at me sitting across the room and yelled, “Fuck you!”

I decided at that moment that something about my face must have made this guy violently angry, so I would just get up and go into another room.

Security showed up and asked if I wanted to press charges.  Of course not.  It’s not his fault.  Plus, that’s the last thing this day needs.

So then I was pacing back and forth in another empty room.  I wasn’t angry, but I did have to push that down a little bit because my adrenaline was high.  You know, because I just got punched in the face.  The primal, dumb testosterone reaction is to get mad.  But whatever.  I was actually fine.  It didn’t seem like there was any swelling or anything broken, and it mostly stopped hurting fairly quickly.

Our department was small.  There might have been a handful of people there on any given day.  Six or seven would be a lot.  Suddenly there were probably thirty people in the hallway of our department, all asking what happened and if I was okay.  It felt like they just stepped directly out of the walls.

Someone handed me a can of Sprite and told me to put it on my face.

“I’m fine, really,” I said.  And I was.

“You should go to the ER,” a few of them said.  “You should just go down to the ER.”

“No seriously, I’m fine.”  Give me someone else to scan, I thought.  Not that guy, obviously, but I was ready to get back to work.

Finally, a nurse I got along well with told me, “No, you were physically attacked at work. You HAVE to go to the ER.”

Alright, fair enough.  I began walking out of the department.  My manager, who was somewhat new to the job, told me to wait.  She was very flustered.

“Alright, it’s okay,” she said as she stopped me.  “I’m going to walk you to the ER.”  She began repeating that, almost to herself.  Then a few seconds later, she began asking everyone else around us, “Okay, where’s the ER?!  I need to take him to the ER!”

So I walked her to the ER.

I arrived and checked in.  They took me back to the triage area.  As I was having my blood pressure taken, my great friend Kevin texted me to bitch about, I don’t know, whatever it was.

“That’s cool.  I just got punched in the face by a patient,” I typed back.  I’ll never forget Kevin’s response.

“Oh my god are you okay?  Photo or it didn’t happen.”  Asshole.

I read it like it was one sentence because, in reality, it kind of was.  Once I got into a room and finally had a moment to myself, I removed the ice pack that the ER had given me to replace the Sprite can.  I quickly took a look on the camera of my phone, ready to take a pic and dunk on my buddy for being a jerk.

Nothing.  No black eye, no obvious swelling, barely even a mark.  Man, I just got attacked by someone, my friend called my punk card, and I’ve got nothing to show him up with.

At this point it was all pretty funny to me.  I overheard someone at the nurses’ station outside my room ask what the security alert was about.  I peeked out with a big grin and said, “Oh yeah that was me.  Got punched in the face.  No biggie.”

A couple of hours later I was back in my department laughing about the whole thing with my coworkers.  That was where they gave me the nickname Tyson.  I pointed out several times, however, that Mike Tyson would normally do the punching.

The reason it was funny to us was because it could have been a lot worse.  He could have hit me in a way that did way more damage.  I could have hit my head on the desk or the floor on the way down.  He could have decided to hop off the exam table, get on top of me and just start going to town.  And I would have been toast.  Also, I’m glad that I was the one that got hit, as opposed to some of my smaller coworkers.

As a side note, I had been on a diet that entire week.  I had committed to temporarily going vegan for five straight days, like a health cleanse.  I planned to steadily add things back into my regular diet after.  Quick Disclaimer: that’s not something I read anywhere or heard from anyone that knows what they’re talking about.  I just tried it on a whim.  Monday I was going strong.  Tuesday was difficult but I made it through.  Wednesday I recovered, thinking hey, I think I might make it!

Then Thursday morning I got punched in the face, so on my early trip home from work I stopped by an A&W.

So basically, I tried going vegan and got punched in the face.  Lesson learned, I guess.

That’s how I became Crash Tyson.